For the past few weeks, I’ve been announcing the launch of new services on the site, starting with the brand fundamentals, followed by the content strategy; and now, having put those frameworks into place, I’m talking about bringing it all to life in your marketing activities.

We tend to dive straight into the marketing – running ads and competitions, sending out press releases, organising fancy photo shoots – while it really does help to get those strategic foundations in place before we get into the execution.

Sharpening the tools: Optimise your marketing strategy and plans across all touch points to ensure your efforts are working effectively towards your objectives

Sometimes you’ve been operating for a while, you’re active on a number of different platforms and you’ve been putting content out there, but you’re just not seeing the results you were hoping for, in terms of traffic to your site or conversion to sales (or both). Sound familiar?

Unfortunately we can’t just launch and leave these platforms. Effective marketing requires listening to your customers, tracking results, and optimising or sometimes even changing direction entirely when it’s clear that things aren’t working. Sharpening each tool in the toolbox is going to ensure that you continue to get the results that you want – and more!

So what does optimisation involve?

Let’s take a few examples of areas of your marketing that might need optimisation.

First, your website.

We’ve written a whole post on this one, but here are a few highlights:

check your home page to make sure that there’s one clear message and action your customer is expected to take;

make sure your navigation is simple and intuitive and your customer can find the information they need; and

review your content to ensure that it is relevant and engaging for your target customer, regularly updated, and also technically optimised for search and mobile.

The website is often the core of your marketing eco-system and yet it’s also often abandoned once launched, with only parts of it updated with new product launches and other areas overlooked.

Second, your social media strategy and platforms.

Again, it can be easy to create social media profiles on all the major networks and then get busy posting away, soon losing sight of what the objective was and failing to react and respond when things change. Your community manager should be regularly reviewing your content and your results and looking at how you can make it work even harder for you. For example:

is your branding up to date and consistent across all your platforms?

which of your platforms is performing best, in terms of engagement, traffic, conversions?

what kind of content is performing best and why? Can you create more of this type of content and de-prioritise other less effective content?

Reviewing your results regularly and optimising your activities as you go will ensure that you are using your budget and other resources effectively towards your objectives.

Of course, optimisation is important not just for your online platforms but for all your marketing activities – and having an objective expert come in and review those activities will help to pick up on things that your internal organisation is likely to miss.

Discover our new services to help you audit and optimise your marketing activities:

· DIY coaching

If you’re an early-stage startup with limited time, money and manpower, then the DIY coaching solution is for you. After all, you’re the expert on your business! You’ll be in the driver’s seat, with an expert there to help you navigate the roads.

· Workshop facilitation

If you have a larger team and want your key stakeholders to be involved in the process so that the team is fully leveraged and engaged, then the interactive workshop is the most effective solution. This can also be of value if you’re already an established business but are finding that you’re not getting the results you’re hoping for with your content marketing efforts. We’ll get together and share best practices, spend time on key exercises to draw out important insights, and pull it all together into a strong marketing plan that will guide your future activities.

· Customised solution

Finally of course there is a fully customised, ‘done-for-you’ solution that we can develop to be tailored specifically to your situation and objectives.

One of the questions I get asked the most is: What are the latest trends in digital marketing? What’s big at the moment? What’s coming up next year? And I must admit that I’m always reluctant to answer these types of questions.

First of all, it’s hard to stay on top of the absolute latest developments in such a fast-moving industry – I do my best with Twitter and webinars and podcasts and conferences, but I’m bound to have missed something.

Second, and more importantly, I’m hesitant to talk about all those sexy trends, as they can really be distracting. Most big companies are slow-moving machines and if you’re constantly jumping on the latest trend not only will your efforts be fragmented but by the time you’re ready it won’t be a trend anymore! On top, you’ll be sidetracked from implementing the fundamentals, which ultimately will drive the success of your business.

No, really, what are the latest trends in digital marketing?

Okay, okay, let’s talk some trends.

Augmented reality and Virtual reality

Let’s start with the sexiest of them all, thanks to the recent Pokémon Go trend (although – is that still a thing?), the first time that augmented reality has been used in a mainstream way. AR is essentially about the overlay of information onto the real world (while VR is escaping into a fully virtual world). You need only look at Snapchat’s filters (they’re amazing!) to think of applications in make-up or clothing; and what about GPS navigation, or sightseeing, or children’s books?

Data and analytics

Ah “big data” – ironically this one is a sexy term for something that’s not usually very sexy: databases, analytics, technology that is essentially working behind the scenes. This is about capturing data, storing that data, analysing it, visualising it… In marketing, we can use this data to improve forecasting and planning, to optimise our campaigns in real time, to better understand our customers, and to personalise our offerings to those customers. However, it’s a question both of having the technology to make this kind of analytics possible and of having the expertise and the organisational set-up to be able to do something about it.

Marketing automation

Companies are recognising the need to work smarter in digital marketing, turning to marketing automation software to manage things like personalised email communication and landing pages. Automation technology is getting more and more sophisticated as well, allowing for immediate responses to your customers’ actions and real-time personalisation. The most successful companies have been using marketing automation to great effect already in the last few years, while there is a big opportunity for small companies in particular to implement it in their business.

(Live) video

Video has been on the rise for years with more and more brands and businesses choosing to present their content in visual form, increasingly in video. Facebook video views have increased from one billion to eight billion in just a year, while ten billion videos are watched on Snapchat every day; Instagram is also increasingly focusing on video. With Periscope and Facebook Live we now see live streaming coming to the fore as well, allowing for a less formal and more intimate, real-time engagement with your customers.

Mobile

The year of mobile has been and gone and we’ve passed the tipping point so that mobile internet usage now exceeds desktop. Mobile commerce is expected to make up almost half of total eCommerce sales by 2020. Unless you’re one of the big guys – Facebook, Amazon, and the likes – you’re going to need to focus on mobile web rather than hoping that consumers will download your specific app. At the very least, your website needs to be responsive (so that the layout adapts optimally to the size of the device), with optimised mobile checkout becoming more of a priority.

How will these trends affect our business strategies?

For most established companies, it’s still a question of dealing with what’s already happened, let alone jumping on the latest trends. They’re still struggling to operate in an environment where all this new technology has emerged, we’ve seen the proliferation of content, there are endless new channels and devices, not to mention changing customer expectations…

The implications of these huge changes are that traditional models and legacy systems don’t work, new competitors are disrupting the category (think Uber, Airbnb), we need to be ‘always-on’ even though our organisations are structured around an on-off product cycle, we need new expertise, we need somehow to bring together all the data from different sources, we need to collaborate much more across functions and channels…

This is what digital transformation is all about: not just investing in new technology but more importantly implementing organisational changes to be able to leverage that technology. So we need to be building digital capabilities across the board, re-structuring the organisation to be always-on and much more agile, leveraging all that data (ideally real-time), failing fast… and learning fast too.

Back to basics

Ultimately, marketing is still about how to engage our customers, the technology just a tool in which to achieve that. And so, for me, we come back to the fundamentals: understanding your target audience, being clear on your brand benefits, creating great content that is distributed across a search- and mobile-optimised website and other relevant platforms…

So before you jump on that sexy new digital trend that’s on the horizon, go back to the fundamentals and make sure that you’re doing those right. A fancy new technology built on shaky foundations will not a successful business make…

When we’re launching a brand or a product, it’s easy to jump straight to the execution of the marketing campaign and its tactics. We think of a contest idea for Instagram, or start planning budget for Facebook ads, or maybe we start creating some great video content for YouTube, or an email blast. There’s an important step missing here, though, that’s absolutely crucial: setting an objective.

Without an objective, we’re working in the dark. We can’t possibly choose the right tools for that objective if we don’t know what it is, and we certainly won’t be able to measure its success after the campaign has finished as we won’t have anything to measure against. Setting a clear objective will allow you to focus your time and money when faced with choices between different activities and platforms, and will ensure that you can assess your results against that original objective. If you’re working with an agency, this will also help you to hold them accountable (make sure you set the objectives together).

Ultimately, of course, what most businesses want is sales. That may or may not be the primary objective of a particular campaign, however. Let’s say you’re just launching a new brand – nobody’s heard of you, you haven’t established any credibility or built any trust – in which case asking people to buy from you right away is a very big leap.

Here are some different objectives that you may want to consider:

1. Building awareness

In the example above, when you’re launching a new brand – or a product, for that matter – then your objective is likely to be primarily one of building awareness that your brand, or product, even exists. This means getting to where your potential customer is receptive to your message and introducing them to who you are and the benefits that you offer. With an awareness objective especially, you’ll want to make sure you are targeting a specific audience and market so that your money works hard for you and so that you don’t spread yourself too thin.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): advertisingimpressions, number of new website visitors, social mentions

2. Generating leads

A lot of marketing advice for small businesses is about generating leads, often in the form of gathering the email addresses of prospective clients. This allows you to communicate with these prospects and build a relationship with them, continuing the conversation after the first contact, demonstrating additional value and, eventually, asking for that sale. The simplest way to get these leads is with an opt-in form on your website, offering helpful content such as a checklist, an ebook, a video course, etc. in return for the customer’s details. Of course these shouldn’t just be any leads but rather qualified leads, i.e. prospects who you will be able to serve with your products and services.

3. Increasing engagement

When we first started to use Facebook pages, managers were focused on simply getting more likes on the page; since then we’ve realised that those likes don’t mean anything if your followers are not engaging with your content. You can add further value and nurture relationships with your leads and followers by investing in content creation to entertain or inspire those prospects and so build your brand reputation. Education may also be a specific objective here, i.e. educating the prospect on the value of your products or services to bring them closer to a purchase decision. You might create content that compares your product to its competitors, or write “how-to” articles that add value beyond just talking about the product benefits.

4. Driving sales

Driving sales may be the ultimate goal of everything you do, but even this goal can be broken down: Are you looking to drive volume (number of sales) or $ value? Do you want to drive acquisition of new customers, increase the average order value or basket size, or drive repeat purchases among existing customers? Which objective you choose will depend on the nature of your industry and your product, and will clearly drive different tactical choices: you might increase the basket size by offering complimentary products or up-selling at checkout; or you might drive repeat purchases by maintaining regular communication with past customers and perhaps sharing exclusive offers or discounts.

KPIs: number and value of total sales, average order value or baset size, repeat purchases

5. Building loyalty and advocacy

Of course, your work doesn’t end with the sale; once the sale is completed, there’s still a question of providing quality customer service, creating loyalty and driving advocacy to maintain and build your brand. What does your returns and repairs policy look like? How can you add value to a customer after the purchase? How can you encourage customers to leave positive reviews or testimonials, and to recommend you to their friends? In today’s world of online and social this post-purchase stage is absolutely crucial and you’re missing a big opportunity, or even damaging your brand, by neglecting it.

Whatever you choose to focus on, you’ll want to get as specific as you can, quantifying the objective and setting a deadline where possible, alongside other more qualitative measures. For example, “Increase the number of visitors to the site from 10,000 to 50,000 in the next year”, “Increase the average order value to £50 per customer by the end of October”.

This is a common question, and an important one when you’re trying to build a new brand and create a business from nothing. You’ll have limited time, money and people on the one hand, but you’ll be impatient to get big results and fast.

Rather than buying followers or running other dodgy activities that will get you fast but superficial results at the long-term expense of your business, you need to make sure that you are focusing on getting the fundamentals of your business in place. With the basic structure set up, you can build on this and see some great results in both the short and long term.

Getting clear on your strategy

As always, your first port of call is your strategy. What’s the bigger ‘why’ of your business, what’s your purpose? What are your specific objectives? What are you trying to achieve and by when? Who is your target audience and what do you know about them? What problem are you solving?

If you jump into execution, if you start designing a website and creating social media pages without any strategy in place, you’re likely to end up with a fragmented mess that fails to build a cohesive online presence for you and your brand. A poorly designed website that links to ten different social profiles, each one half-heartedly put together and abandoned after the first week, can be worse than not having anything at all.

Where will you focus your limited resources? What is the purpose and role of each element in your marketing plan? What products and services are you providing and where? What action do you want your potential customer to take? What’s the ‘path to purchase’? Having a clear objective and an understanding of your target audience will help you to focus your attention where it matters.

Creating a website at the core of your ecosystem

When it comes to having an online presence, the first place to start will nearly always be your website. This is the hub for your content, it’s the one place where you 100% own the platform and you control the message and its delivery.

Your website should have a simple but unique domain name; the layout should be responsive, i.e. it should adapt to the screen size of different devices; and it should contain the key content laid out in a simple and intuitive navigation. Try to think longer term, i.e. think of how your business will grow – but don’t get too ambitious too soon. It’s fine to start with something basic, don’t go overboard with a complex custom design as you’ll most likely need to change it soon as your business evolves. Design with your objective in mind: Do you need to be able to sell products on your site? Do you want to direct people to an offline store? Do you want to collect people’s email addresses? The answers to these questions will determine how you set up your site.

With your website as the hub of your business, you can direct people here via your business cards, email signature, LinkedIn profile, and so on and people will have a quick and effective way of understanding who you are and what you stand for. A website that’s not mobile friendly, is poorly designed and doesn’t appear on the first page of Google search results is going to do nothing for your business or, worse, will be detrimental.

Creating content to win with Google and your customers

Content will be at the heart of everything you do on your website and beyond. What’s your core brand message? What do you want to stand for? What do you want to be known for? What do you want to write about, talk about, engage people on? What parts of your personal story are relevant here?

Of course, these questions represent only one side of the coin. The most effective content for you to create will sit in the sweet spot between what you as a brand want to talk about and what your customers are looking for. Publishing relevant and engaging content that meets customer needs will help you to rank highly in Google results and become a go-to resource for your target audience.

To find out what your customers want, you can use tools like Google Keyword Planner to review their search queries, you can find studies online, and sometimes you can simply talk to them! Find ways to answer their questions, solving their problems with your content. Can you write ‘how-to’ articles or step-by-step guides? Can you share your own personal experiences? Is there a ‘behind-the-scenes’ angle that can add interest? Creating different types of content, from broader lifestyle themes down to the detailed product information, will ensure that you have plenty to talk about on your site and on your social networks.

Choosing the best social media channels

It’s easy to be tempted by the newest shiny thing, and to want to be present anywhere, but spreading yourself too thin is a recipe for being completely ineffective. Choose 2-3 key platforms where you will focus your energy and activity.

The platforms you choose will depend on a few things, including your target audience and where they hang out – e.g. you might choose to be on Snapchat and Instagram for a Millennial target – and the type of content you are creating – e.g. if you create a lot of video then YouTube might be a good platform, if you’re confident being spontaneous and articulate on camera you might publish on Facebook live or on Periscope, if your business is in food and you can take a lot of beautiful images you might consider Instagram and Pinterest. If you’re really not sure, then Facebook is usually a good place to start – almost everyone is on Facebook!

Once you’ve chosen your 2-3 networks, you want to first of all set them up beautifully, creating cover images and profile pictures in the correct dimensions, filling in all the information fields, and so on; then you’ll want to create a publishing calendar whereby you stick to a schedule of posting regularly and consistently. Remember that it’s not just about marketing your product, social media is a two-way conversation with your potential or existing customers and you need to engage them on broader content themes with a more general lifestyle approach.

Amplifying your content via paid advertising and partnerships

Building your credibility and thought leadership via SEO, blog posting and social media engagement can be incredibly effective; it can also be quite slow. If you want to give your online presence a quick boost, you’re going to want to set aside a budget for promoting your content and platforms.

Facebook ads are one of the easier options to get your head around and you can easily set up a campaign to drive likes of your Facebook page or traffic to your website. You might also consider Google ads, pushing specific messages to well targeted audiences based on the search terms they are using. In this way, you can make sure that you are serving your ads only to people who are actively looking for what you are offering.

Another option to get some fast reach is to partner with someone who already has a big following. This might be a celebrity – probably a local celebrity rather than an A-lister, since we’re talking small budgets here – or simply an influencer in the industry, maybe a blogger or a specific media outlet in your industry. Try to offer something of value in return, perhaps an exclusive offer for their readers, or coverage on your own blog. PR coverage can also help here, but it’s not going to be a panacea.

Consulting is a large and growing field, popular with business school graduates and entrepreneurs alike. The work promises involvement in strategy at the highest level, exposure to different companies and industries, and potentially high salaries (along with long working hours, naturally). There is clearly a demand for these external consultants to come in and find solutions for specific issues where the internal expertise or resources just won’t do. However, there are pitfalls with this approach, notably that the solution may just be a “quick fix” lacking ownership within the organisation and therefore lacking any sustainable impact. This is where I believe consulting can benefit from a coaching approach.

What is consulting?

Look up “consulting” or “consultancy” and you’ll find some variation of this definition: consulting is providing expert advice within a particular field. The expertise that the independent consultant or consulting firm offers is an expertise that the client lacks, at least at the present time. Consultants can provide an objective view on a company’s situation, independently of any internal politics or organisational complexities, and will bring in frameworks and tools as well as broad experience in a given field. Sometimes consultants are also brought in simply to fill a gap, in more of a contractor capacity.

As consultants, we will come in to an organisation and depending on the brief we will talk to the key stakeholders and then apply our thinking and knowledge to the specific situation and propose a strategy, a new process, a new organisational structure… We may also provide training for the team that will implement the new approach and we may even be there for a long time – but eventually and by definition we will leave.

The pitfalls of consulting

This model means that consulting can be focused rather on the short term, “in-out”, leaving the client to take it from there. The risk, then, is that this is where it all comes to a standstill. The focus is shifted elsewhere, other priorities take over, and the internal team often lacks both the time and the knowledge needed to move things along. I’ve heard this often lamented among my consultant colleagues, and saw it happen for example when my colleagues did three-month stints in Africa with a UN organisation and found that nothing moved at all during the year that passed between their visits.

This is where I think that elements of coaching can come into play. The International Coaching Federation describes coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential”. It’s a relatively new field, although it’s said to originate in the Socratic approach of asking questions to help stimulate thinking. Today it can encompass sports coaching, executive, business and leadership coaching, life coaching, spiritual coaching, and an endless array of other coaching contexts.

The benefits of coaching

The key difference between consulting and coaching is that the expertise in a coaching relationship is assumed to be on the client side. Of course the coach is (hopefully) trained and qualified and will expertly support the client in getting to the answers, but ultimately we trust that the client will have all the answers. If we take business coaching, which is most relevant in the consulting context, the client is the expert on their business, their target audience, their own strengths, and so on.

So what are the benefits of a pure coaching approach? Well, importantly, we are empowering the client to take responsibility for their own decisions, using their own expertise. This will bring a more sustainable solution since they are learning to think for themselves (the classic “teach them to fish” scenario), getting a deeper understanding than is possible if someone just comes in and tells them the answer, and taking real ownership of that answer and its implementation going forward.

An optimal blend

Now can we rely solely on such an open coaching approach in the business context? Probably not. In one of the few articles I’ve found on the subject, Cheryl Belles talks of a “bell curve” along which various blends of consulting and coaching exist, depending on the specific situation. Sometimes the client just wants a quick fix and doesn’t care about the longer-term anchoring in the organisation. Sometimes you really do need the specific expertise, for example, in new areas like digital marketing (yes, it’s still new for a lot of people!), technically complex subject matters and areas where it’s simply more effective to bring in someone who really knows what they are doing. But there is definitely a role for an element of coaching even in more traditional consulting situations and you’re bound to see longer lasting results if you use this blended approach.

Mentoring is an interesting area that seems to offer this type of blend of consulting and coaching. The mentoring relationship assumes that the mentor is an expert with experience for example in setting up a business; but the most effective approach is still to start by asking questions to get the mentee thinking, to allow them the space to come up with their own solutions. Again, the mentee is the expert on their own business, their customers, their particular strengths and skills, and they are the ones who will live with the decisions that they are making. As mentors we will still bring in our experience and offer suggestions, but it is up to the mentee to decide which option to go for.

Are you a consultant using elements of this “coaching” approach in your practice? Or maybe you’re a coach also using elements of consulting? Please share your thoughts and experience in the comments below!

Looking for a consultant, a coach, or a blend of the two? Get in touch to discuss your specific needs.